Debugging

Debugging with edebug

Despite the best of intentions, everyone writing code eventually needs to starting printing things out to figure out what on earth is happening. In addition to the normal logging level functions einfo, ewarn, eerror, we also have edebug that is a little different. By default, the edebug logging “level” is hidden. So by default, this statement won’t produce any output:

edebug "foo just borked rc=${rc}"

But you can activate the output from these edebug statements either wholesale or selectively by setting an environment variable. Setting EDEBUG=1 will turn on all edebug output globally. We use it pretty pervasively, so that might be a lot and probably counter-productive for complex systems. Instead of turning everything on, you can turn on edebug just for code in certain files or functions. For example, using EDEBUG="dtest dmake" will turn on debugging for any edebug statements in any file or function with dtest or dmake as part of their names.

Another super powerful feature of edebug is that you can pipe output into it and it will simply discard the output if debugging is not enabled. For example:

cmd |& edebug

The value of EDEBUG is actually a space-separated list of terms. If any of those terms match the filename (just basename) or the name of the function that contains an edebug statement, it will generate output.

Beyond debugging with etrace

But maybe you’ve looked at all the debugging output you can find and you still need more information about what is going on. You may be aware that you can get bash to print each command before it executes it by turning on the set -x option. ebash takes this a little further by using selective controls for command tracing rather than blanket turning on set -x for the entire script. For instance, I have the following script that on my machine is named etrace_test.

1 #!/usr/bin/env bash
2
3 # Pull in ebash
4 $(ebash --source)
5
6 echo "Hi"
7 a=alpha
8 b=beta
9 echo "$(lval a b)"

I ran the script with etrace enabled and got this output. Note that rather than just the command (as set -x would give you), etrace adds the file, line number, and current process PID.

$ ETRACE=etrace_test ./etrace_test
[etrace_test:6:main:24467] echo "Hi"
Hi
[etrace_test:7:main:24467] a=alpha
[etrace_test:8:main:24467] b=beta
[etrace_test:9:main:24467] echo "$(lval a b)"
[etrace_test:9:main:25252] lval a b
a="alpha" b="beta"

Like EDEBUG, ETRACE is a space-separated list of patterns which will be matched against your current filename and function name. The etrace functionality has a much higher overhead than does running with edebug enabled, but it can be immensely helpful when you really need it.

One caveat: you can’t change the value of ETRACE on the fly. The value it had when you sourced ebash is the one that will affect the entire duration of the script.